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driveway and drove away.
    Andy and I looked at each other.
    “What the hell is in those bags?” Andy asked.
I could only shake my head. “They’re always heavy. How can one old
man have such heavy trash?”
    “Maybe it’s not that the trash is heavy,” I
suggested.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, he’s old. Maybe he’s just weak.”
    Andy thought about that for a moment. “Why
doesn’t he use smaller bags so he won’t have to struggle so much?
He doesn’t struggle with his white bags.”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe his trash
won’t fit in a smaller bag.”
    “He’s a little old man who lives alone. How
much trash could he possibly accumulate in one week? What could he
have over there – some soup cans, maybe some bread wrappers or
something? Light stuff. But he’s always carrying out these enormous
bags, filled with something so heavy, it’s a struggle for him. I
don’t get it.”
    We paused to ponder the mystery.
    “How often does he take out a bag?” I asked,
trying to solve the puzzle.
    Andy snorted, “You know more than I do.
You’re out here all the time.”
    That was true. I tried to remember if I’d
noticed a pattern in the days Jenson took the bags to wherever he
took them. I was coming up empty. After a year of sitting on a
porch directly across the street, a year of watching him, I hadn’t
really paid any attention to him. Sure, I’d seen him. I’d noticed
him enough at the time to talk to Andy about it. But I hadn’t
noticed enough to recollect anything. No patterns were clear in my
mind. I only knew a lot of heavy black bags had came out of his
house, been put in his trunk, and been driven away.
    We sat on the porch for another hour or so
before Jenson came back. We watched in silence again as he made his
way out of the car and into the house.
    “I’m dying to know what he’s doing,” Andy
said in frustration. “We need to keep track of what days he does
this, see if we can figure out a pattern or a schedule.” He stood
to leave. “And, hey, think about what I said before about us
following him once. I’m starting to lose sleep wondering what’s
going on.”
    “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
    “Yeah, that’s what Dahmer’s neighbors thought
too.”
    Andy wasn’t going to let this rest until we
knew what Jenson was doing. As I realized this, I sighed deeply and
went in to mark the calendar that hung in the kitchen. I simply put
the letter j on today’s square. I wondered how long I’d have to do
this, how many j’s would be on this calendar before a pattern
emerged. What if a pattern never emerged? What if it was all
random? Well, I knew the answer to that. Andy would make me follow
Jenson one day. I shuddered at the thought of stalking an old
man.
    After grabbing a soda from the refrigerator,
I returned to the porch, where I quickly saw I wasn’t alone.
     
     
     
6 Owen
    “Were you two watching Mr. Jenson?” she
asked, occupying the seat Andy had just vacated.
    Blushing slightly, I said, “Sort of.”
    “Why?” she crossed her right leg over her
left in a swift motion and I tried not to notice.
    Taking my seat, I said, “He’s sort of a
mystery to us. It’s killing Andy.” I popped the top on my soda and
offered it to her. She declined.
    “What kind of mystery?” asked Carla.
    I considered the reasons why I shouldn’t tell
her, but couldn’t think of a single one. I told her about the heavy
bags. She listened intently as I described how he never had
visitors and wasn’t social with anyone on the street. When I said
it had been this way since he’d moved in two years earlier, her
eyebrows drew together in suspicion.
    “Why are you looking like that?” I asked
her.
    “I was just thinking.”
    When she hesitated, I asked, “About
what?”
    “Well, it seems like a lot of things have
happened here in the last two years.” She looked down at her wrist,
fiddling with her bracelet. I could tell by the way she bit her
lower lip she was